CBSE · Class 10 · Social Science · History: The Making of a Global WorldHow did food travel from one country to another in the pre-modern world? Explain with the help of examples like potatoes and spaghetti.

Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange. Traders and travellers introduced new crops to the lands they travelled. It is believed that noodles travelled west from China to become spaghetti. Or, perhaps Arab traders took pasta to fifth-century Sicily, an island now in Italy. Many of our common foods such as potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies, and sweet potatoes were not known to our ancestors until Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the vast continent of America. These foods were only introduced into Europe and Asia after America was discovered. Sometimes, the introduction of a new crop made the difference between life and death. Europe's poor began to eat better and live longer with the introduction of the humble potato. Ireland's poorest peasants became so dependent on potatoes that when disease destroyed the potato crop in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands died of starvation in the Great Irish Potato Famine.